The difference is self harm vs harming others. The distinction is that advertising may convince people who do not gamble to start gambling.

Gambling is extraordinarily harmful to others, I personally witnessed half a dozen families ruined completely by gambling when the country I lived in allowed slot machines everywhere.

“Legalize everything I can do to myself” is a wildly toxic and uneducated message that completely ignores all the knowledge we have accumulated about the weaknesses and loopholes of human nature.

Anecdata, I know a guy who is a chef. He's gambled it all away, it's just 30k$ (in debt) or so but considering the Swedish tax system it's actually a lot of money. Now kronofogden is after him, he's recently been handed divorce papers and the government takes half his paycheck.

He's got 3 kids (duh) so it immediately affects 4 people while straining even more, for what gain? Megaprofits for $megagamblingcorp?

1. Thats a criteria based on harm, not “free society”.

2. Gambling has massive harms on others. The family of the men who gamble (it’s usually men gambling on sports), including the minor kids who cannot leave the individual and are dependent on them, as well as broader society which now has to pick up the pieces for this individual and the people dependent on him.

That can't be the difference. Assuming parent poster is talking about gambling hurting people (and ignoring that gambling and most other addictions do hurt others, as siblings pointed out), then banning of hurting others you would mean banning bookmakers, not just their advertisements. Parent was specifically banning advertisements but seemed to be saying to leave gambling industry legal.

I could see the way to argue for banning advertising being along the lines of minimizing harm. You acknowledge that gambling does hurt gamblers but also people close to them and society more broadly, but that prohibition may not be very effective so you permit regulated legal gambling (but no ads). I just don't really see how you can make it a freedom argument.

In order to censor speech, to prevent leading the masses astray, the censor must hear/see it.

Why isn't the censor led astray?

I can't tell if this comment is really serious. In case it needs explanation, you don't ban gambling advertising by having a censor watch every ad and then decide which ones to allow. You pass a law that says "no advertising gambling" and then if someone does it, you prosecute them.

If you ban it it's no longer going to be produced, and all things don't affect all brains equally.

As someone mentioned men are more likely to gamble, I'm sure (but don't quote me on this) that ADHD is over represented as well.

If you broadcast an ad to 10 million people and 1k gets hooked it's still 1k too many lives ruined, while being an annoyance to the other ~10 million

Marxism has resulted in the death of at least 100 million people. Should we ban Marxist content from HN?

By your argument, moderators on HN/Reddit shouldn't remove harmful content, since moderators would still have seen it either way.

If moderators can view it without being harmed, what makes them so special?

I can't tell whether you're trolling or serious...

It's not about moderators being harmed or not. It's a preference of the wider community to not have the harmful content, and the moderators volunteering to help keep it that way.

With most harmful content, the effect of seeing a single instance is not significant. Being exposed to it constantly in places you frequent for other reason (your online communities, or advertisements everwhere), builds up much more of an effect. Now moderators being constantly exposed might also be affected, but they're choosing to do so, and may have coping strategies in place for the more extreme cases.

Online communities can moderate as they see fit. I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about the law banning certain content.

I've lived long enough to see certain kinds of content banned, and then embraced, and then a different kind of content be banned.

Which era is correct in their choice of banning?

What's the deal with trying so hard to defend the advertising of an objectively harmful industry?

I think a good parallel here is Tobacco advertising. Smoking is harmful in every way, therefore I don't see any reason why advertising it to a broad audience (which will inadvertently also include children) is something we should allow.

What's the net benefit of allowing such advertising? I don't see it. Yo could argue something about rights to free speech or some variation, but societies still have a responsibility to look out for the health of their people, no?

I agree that children are special and should be protected.

As for adults, I am an amateur historian. History is jam packed with censorship of things those in power have deemed "harmful". Examples:

1. William Tyndale was burned at the stake for translating the Bible to English.

2. Galileo was put under house arrest for his heliocentric views.

3. Mae West was sentenced to 10 days in jail for her play "Sex".

4. Boris Pasternak's novels were banned in the Soviet Union.

5. TV shows in the 1970s were not allowed to show toilets in the bathrooms.

6. Homosexuality could not be portrayed in films until the 1960s.

7. Howard Stern was fined $2.5m for "indecent" broadcasts.

8. Violence on film is far, far more graphic today than was allowed just a few years ago.

9. You can say "fuck" on TV today, along with nudity.

And on and on it goes. Those censors were just as convinced as you are that they were doing the right thing.

Yeah that's true, random unrelated things did happen in the past, but that's not a credible argument against having slap on the wrist fines for advertising gambling.